"Life is like an onion. You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep."--Carl Sandburg

In my blog yesterday, I mentioned that I have decided to call my new style "Frenetic Cubism." When I was discussing this with an artist friend of mine, he mentioned that I should look up the "Futurist" painters. Of course, I did, and, of course, I am now obsessed with them!

I was familiar with some of this work, but not able to readily match specific names with the art. There are definitely elements of cubism evident here, but there is also lots of movement and layering going on.

This is one of the most famous examples, Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, 1912, in which the artist depicts motion with several superimposed images, similar in effect to selectively layering stop motion photos.

I am including below several more examples of Futurist works. Note: I am labeling them only by artist because I am not sure of some of the titles. I found them on Pinterest, and while I value this site as an exploratory tool, sometimes pinners do not take care to check their sources and info. I was able, however, to verify at least the names of the artists and the countries where they were from.

Artist: Aleksandra Ekster (Russia)

Artist: Yuri Annenkov (Russia)

Artist: Umberto Boccioni (Italy)

Artist: Kazimir Malevich (Russia)

Let me also add this disclaimer: I am aware that the political affiliations of some of thee artists do no agree with mine, but I am posting their work, not to glorify them in any way, but only to use the paintings as illustrative of a style.

As I was looking for Futurist exemplars, I came across this mashup of all six Star Wars movies. It was created by layering them all on top of each other! It can be found at Open Culture by clicking on the logo below.

It really is worth a look. The Open Culture site notes:

Is there some cultural value to this layering of films? Maybe only insofar as it gives the keen observer the chance to find some meta trends running through the films. One YouTuber commented, “The really interesting part is that they’re similarly paced. If you skip around you’ll almost always find all talking scenes lined up and all action scenes lined up. Just shows how formulaic movies are (or at least how formulaic George Lucas is).”

So, I am watching this while I paint today. Then later I will be at the gallery harassing my fellow artists into letting me photograph them while they move through a series of simple acts such as smoking a cigarette, drinking a cup of coffee, etc. These photos will, of course, be used to fuel my frenetic paintings this weekend!

I will close with this interesting observation about time and layers:

"Time perception is very much about how you sequence your activities, how many activities you layer overtop of others, and the types of gaps, if any, you leave in between activities."--Douglas Coupland